‘Watching the Hawks’: New show for millenials who prefer to ask hard questions

Millenials are not easily sold with news and ideas fed to people by corporations and the mainstream media, because they prefer hard questions being asked, Tyrel Ventura, a host of RT America’s new show Watching the Hawks, told Larry King’s Politicking.

King caught up with the crew of the show who say they are trying
to make Americans think outside the box.

Larry King: A trio making up a new generation of
co-hosts for a current events and news talk show hits the
airwaves promising to give viewers a seldom seen perspective to
those who fall somewhere between the war hawks and the
isolationists. The show is hosted by Tyrel Ventura, Sean Stone
and Tabetha Wallace, and we’re here at the beautiful RT studios
in Washington DC.

So you are the sons of famous people, your father was Oliver
Stone, the famous director.

Sean Stone: Still is!

King: Your father is Jesse Ventura, former
governor of Minnesota, who’s half time in Mexico and he also
hosts his own show on Ora TV. And do you have a famous father?

Tabetha Wallace: My father was a janitor at a
grade school for 30 years.

King: The one successful person on this show.
Now all of you are former co-hosts of Buzzsaw. So explain this
transition from Buzzsaw to the new show, Watching the Hawks.

Stone: I’ll talk about it a little bit because
I’m still hosting Buzzsaw online, which is an online news show
that these fair people started with me two years ago. And they
were hosting the news segment and I was doing the interview
section. So they basically came to work for RT about a year ago
and that’s the point that I kept going with the interview side of
Buzzsaw, so they can talk about what they’ve been doing here at
RT preparing this.

Tyrell Ventura: Buzzsaw kind of came out of what
me and Sean were working on Conspiracy Theory…and we got the
opportunity to create a show online on the success of that show
and bring Tabetha in. And that fantastic trio that we made doing
that show, the success of that show got us over here to RT. Me
and Tabetha had been news producing and creating content on RT,
we co-hosted a segment on the daily news show called Press the
Media where we went after the mainstream media and called them
out for any kind of wrong statements or if they weren’t talking
about a story correctly or things of that nature, and away we
went. And in the process of that was when RT looked at the
dynamic of three of us together and they said this could really
make a great daily show.

King: And why the title Watching the Hawks?

Wallace: Most people know the term war hawks.

King: You don’t watch the doves?

Wallace: No we love them. We don’t need to keep
an eye on them. The War Hawks and hawks were kind of a group of
generations which had been sold to. We are sold to probably more
than any generation before us with all of the media and so
someone is always hawking their wares at us, whether its big
business or corporations or its war hawks. And even news hawks
now – you have this media that is sort of selling to us and
selling to us. And no one is really taking a step back and
looking at what effect that has on us. We don’t want to be sold
into a political party. We don’t want to be sold into something.
We want to have a conversation and we are not seeing that
anywhere else now. So we’re trying to keep an eye on it.

King: So looking at you’re DNA, you come from a
rebellious household, you do Shaun. You father is not in the
middle...

Stone: I’ve been a revolutionary since 1984, the
year I was born. That’s kind of my lineage for sure as you
mentioned. Going back to films like The Doors about Jim Morrison,
JFK, even his films about the Vietnam War. He is considered a
political filmmaker.

King: Did he steer you this way?

Stone: I don’t think he directly steered me to
this course but he definitely opened my eyes in many ways since I
would say being a high school teenager, reading history with him.
I would show him my textbooks and he would say: “Ah, you know
that’s hogwash, read this book.” And a lot of that conversation
ended up as part of his Untold History of the United States
series, which he did for Showtime.

King: Your father raised you to be independent?

Ventura: Yes he raised me to be independent, and
he raised me to never be afraid to ask questions. That there is
no such thing as a stupid question and to always question
authority or question history in much the same way. The funny
connection there, is that when I was probably 11 or 12, and when
the movie came out, he took me to go and see JFK in a similar
fashion like, “Look, they’re teaching you this one element of it
at high school, the killing of Kennedy. I want you to see another
aspect of it.” It opened my mind up to the fact that in our
history books we’re generally not told the full story.

King: So you were raised to think
conspiratorial?

Ventura: I wouldn’t say conspiratorial, because
first of all the word conspiratorial, that kind of conspiracy
theorists…

King: I looked it up in the dictionary and got a
picture of your father.

Ventura: The idea of conspiracy theorist and all
that to me is always a little bit wacky, because when you look at
power structures – people get together throughout history to
break the laws or meet their own needs, whether it be through
money or influence, to push their own agenda, and that’s first
politics, that’s just regular government. And so the idea of
“conspiracy theorist” and that kind of thing I think has been
turned into this ugly term when in truth its simply just asking
questions, searching for the truth. And there’s nothing wrong my
dad inspired the hell a lot of that.

Wallace: I’ve always been a writer. I worked at
Newsweek in 2002 and it definitely left an impact on me. I went
into media and worked at Miramax for a couple of years in the
movie industry and then in movie marketing, which teaches you how
to sell things to everybody. And then eventually as things
happened in 2008 it became something that was far more important
than making movies.

King: Is this show, Sean, aimed at millennials?

Stone: I think that’s part of the attraction of
having young news commentators, because you look around at most
of the networks and there is this realization of “wait a minute,
we’re losing the young audience, so how do we appeal to them?”
Maybe we need to find some young voices who have a different
perspective on everything from the political process to world
geopolitics.

King: Do millenials watch the news?

Ventura: I think they would if they thought the
news would ask the hard questions. And I think there are very few
programs out there that millennials can [watch]. When you look at
it, they weren’t born where they lost a certain blindness or
patriotism or whatever you might call it. They were born with the
cynicism, they were born knowing, after Watergate and after all
these events, when they could very easily see that the government
doesn’t tell them the whole truth at times or corporations, like
Tabetha said, are constantly marketing to them and telling them
you’re ugly or whatever just to get them to buy a product. So
they’re born with a certain amount of questioning and you don’t
see that as much. CNN to me just feels like the official mouth of
the State Department, no matter who is in power. And then Fox
plays to its right-wing base... I think the millennials as a
whole don’t want to fall in and don’t want to be categorized to
certain specific groups, they want to do their own independent
thinking.

King: Give me the format of watching the Hawks,
what do I see when I watch it?

Wallace: Well, the format is that we sit down
and we really go through stories – instead of that sort of
break-neck pace…

King: The three of you sitting here, you are all
on camera together?

Wallace: And we will go through a news story and
give as much of the facts and context... I think context is a
really important thing educating people about what the broader
picture is and then looking at a specific news item. And then we
see it from all of our perspectives. We don’t always agree on
things, we have always naturally been people who can disagree and
still have a conversation and walk out learning more about each
other and about the world, and we’re trying to bring a little bit
of that what we have naturally to the air instead of everybody
yelling at each other.

King: The show is at 6 o’clock Eastern Time, is
an hour or half an hour?

Wallace: Half an hour.

King: So one of you is a host or you’re
co-hosts?

Ventura: All of us are hosts, I guess I lead it
off every night, so I guess you could call me the ringmaster, so
to speak. But the great thing about what Tabetha was talking
about, the great thing is that we do have these each individual
identity voices. So Tabetha didn’t come from the same background
that me and Sean came from. I didn’t go to Princeton or Oxford
where Sean did. So we each have these really different
perspectives, and I think the importance of those perspectives is
what is kind of a lost today when you see other shows, when it’s
just one host.

King: You went to Princeton and Oxford?

Stone: I did, I was a Princeton graduate, I went
to Oxford for an exchange for a semester.

King: You once said, “It is my belief that
ideas are the true revolutionaries and unless we are willing to
confront new ideas, no matter how uncomfortable, then we are
doomed to that same corporate-run state that directs us to look
abroad for an enemy, rather than in the thrones of power that
rule over us.”

You don’t see ISIS, al-Shabaab as enemies?

Stone: That’s a long question because obviously
the question is, how direct is ISIS, as an enemy, to the United
States, for example? Are they perhaps a threat to humanity in
that region? Undoubtedly. They are extreme, radical people. But
as an enemy of the United States of America, how dangerous are
they to us? I don’t see them as a tremendous threat.

King: In 1939, one could have said, “Well,
Hitler is no threat to us.”

Stone: Well, who was arming Hitler at the time,
though? As a historian we look at those questions: why is the
British Empire allowing Hitler to rearm? Why are the US
corporations – Standard Oil, Ford Motors, DuPont Corp. – why are
these corporations basically helping Hitler to rearm and expand
his empire? You don’t get arms and weapons from nothing. So
that’s what I look at, the financing and the angle of who is
actually facilitating the warmongers. And that’s oftentimes is
overlook as the idea who’s actually financing these people as
opposed to… those questions.

King: Well what do you do when they are reality?
Let’s say the British financed Hitler. You had to go to war with
him.

Ventura: Yes, at a certain point I believe if
there is truly a direct threat to the US, and when you look at
situations like a growing threat there, you have to change people
through their culture. Dropping bombs on people doesn’t
necessarily prevent it. There are cases in history where outright
war has worked, of course, but ultimately if you want to truly
change a culture, you have to build the culture up around them
that allow those people in that region to have the strength and
the want to get rid of something like ISIS. If we go in and start
dropping bombs on ISIS, all we’re going to be doing is
potentially killing other civilians, which then bolsters their
cause.

Because, ultimately, ISIS wants us to come in and be that outside
Western power so it justifies their belief system. There are
better ways to fight a group like ISIS than just going over and
laying waste to the region again, which we’ve done now for the
last 15-some-odd years.

King: Do you feel, Tabetha, when you have these
views, which could be labeled progressive – all of you I’d call
progressives – that you’re fighting windmills?

Wallace: Yeah, because sometimes you’re trying
to have a conversation about what’s going on – if it’s drone
strikes or it’s our military operations – when you’re trying to
just get facts and trying to say, “Is there a better way that we
can do this that won’t cost so much human life?” You’re
immediately labeled this: “Well you’re a liberal, you’re a
progressive.” You’re fighting that stereotype that’s being put in
place and nobody’s really talking about what’s happening to
people and what’s the future of that.

We’ve been through war after war, and it seems like we should be
a little bit better at protecting people without losing so many
lives and losing so much history and so much heart in who we are
in order to do it.

King: You converted to Islam, did you not, Sean?

Stone: I accepted Islam, because I feel that
Islam is an extension of Judeo-Christian culture, which most
people don’t understand. They look at Islam as a foreign entity
as opposed to an outgrowth of the Jewish texts, of the Christian
religion, of Islam actually accepting Christ as the Messiah. All
these factors I looked at and said, actually, I think Mohammed
was a prophet in that lineage, so when I accept Mohammed as a
prophet that makes me Muslim. Many people miss that point by
saying Islam is a foreign religion that’s sort of an antithesis,
but it’s really not.

King: Do you the therefore dislike the term
“Islamic terrorism?”

Stone: I don’t feel any particular dislike. I
don’t like terrorism in general, but I also would argue that
terrorism is many types of different warfare, even if it is being
launched by American drone planes or bombers that kill civilians.
What is terror ultimately? It is the destruction of human life en
masse without regard to the consequence of what you are creating
as Tyrel talked about. When you bomb civilians, you create the
ISIS situation in Iraq when you destroy their infrastructure and
all of a sudden turn a lot of Sunnis and Shias against each other
at a time when they were formally living in peace – and you
create these ISIS groups. So terrorism is often created by war,
which is terror.

King: Don’t you think Tyrel that America’s
virtues are well-grounded? We have of course made mistakes, but
the concept of the Constitution is a pretty good one.

Ventura: It’s an amazing one. I consider any
time that you speak out for your beliefs, which this country has
an amazing constitution that allows us to do that. And we are
seeing that taken away more – but I think it is worth fighting
for. That is why we do what we do and that is why we speak out
because it should be that every voice should be heard and every
voice should have a say. It’s a beautiful country.

King: The co-hosts of “Watching the Hawks,”
Tyrel Ventura, Sean Stone and Tabetha Wallace. Check out the show
on RT America Monday through Thursdays at 6 Eastern.